by Tom Sutcliffe | Mar 22, 2019 | Music
Misfortune cookies The Royal Opera has sold this production expensively and successfully not because of the work itself, however interesting (and it really is), but because of Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann as Leonora and Alvaro. Nobody likes Christof Loy’s muddled... 
by Lucien Jenkins | Mar 9, 2019 | Music
Killer queen The low point in Donizetti’s “Elizabeth and Essex” opera comes when the pit strikes up a version of the National Anthem. The howling anachronism isn’t the problem: the history of opera contains many such, and we tend to cope. The trouble is,... 
by Music Editor | Mar 3, 2019 | Music
Grace notes by Robert Thicknesse As with nearly all innovations in 19th-century opera, it was Gioachino Rossini who discovered the obvious truth that Queen Elizabeth I was a born coloratura; handy for Gaetano Donizetti, who later put the queen at the heart of two... 
by Tom Sutcliffe | Mar 3, 2019 | Music
PISS POOR Franz Lehár’s operetta, newly staged at the Coliseum by English National Opera, looks sort of traditionally Edwardian – except for the slinky contemporary ballgown worn by Sarah Tynan in the title role of Hanna Glawari, as up-to-the-minute as the MeToo... 